John Tortorella just might be the smartest man in New York. The coach of the Rangers is definitely the crankiest, and that’s saying something considering crabby tends to be the default position of anyone hoping to not get chewed up and spat out by the city’s insatiable demands.

His irritability is on display whenever a Ranger takes a bad penalty or a call goes the wrong way. There goes Tortorella, berating the offending player who obviously doesn’t want it badly enough, or the linesman who’s clearly suffering from cataracts and dementia. Season ticket holders who sit near the team bench at Madison Square Garden say a Tortorella tirade can be the most entertaining show on Broadway, as long as the kiddies’ ears are muffed.

But his brilliance doesn’t really kick in until he slips through the side door that leads to the press room and gets into a blinking contest with reporters. From afar, outsiders might think reporters—especially sports reporters, and especially sports reporters from New York —want nothing more than to prove they have an IQ higher than a slug. And while that might sometimes be true, reporters on deadline want only succinct answers so they can file stories and catch the last train out of Penn Station, or maybe last call.

Tortorella obliges, at least when it comes to the part about being succinct. He’s turned pithy replies into a one-act routine, his terse postgame appearances in front of the microphones must-see TV. Think the Rangers block shots at an absurd pace? They’ve obviously learned from the master.

After the New Jersey Devils beat the Rangers 3-2 Wednesday night to knot the Eastern Conference finals at one game apiece, Tortorella smartly deflected the game’s themes, turning his team’s curiously inconsistent performance and heavy legs into a conversation about how the New York coach is, well, a donkey’s ass.

In less than 40 words, the transcript confirmed it. “A number of things. I’ll keep it in the room,” Tortorella said to a question about what went wrong. Twice came “No.” And the longer version of “I answered your first question. No.” And the positively eloquent, “You need to improve as a hockey team every game.” To a query from the venerable hockey writer Stan Fischler regarding what areas Tortorella would like to see improve, there was again this beauty: “I’m gonna keep it in the room, Stan.”

This was quite an improvement from the other day, when Tortorella uttered all of six words, his session with the media lasting 26 amusing seconds. You know it’s getting to be obnoxious when even hockey insiders—perhaps the most back-slapping group in all of sports—are fed up with Tort’s unwillingness to play along.

On the NHL Network, Craig Button called Tortorella’s surly press conferences a "travesty," fuming "it's a joke, he's making it a joke, it's an unnecessary joke, so stop it." In the NBC studios, Mike Milbury said that while he understands Tortorella has to protect his players, he’s gone past being rude.

Oh kettle, how black art thou?

In barely more than a minute, with facial contortions more often seen downwind from a manure factory, Tortorella again shoved himself into the forefront after a Game 2 loss. The obsession turned from the deflected pucks that sailed past Henrik Lundqvist to Tortorella’s rudeness. The overnight chatter stretched past the Rangers’ fatigue brought on by a pair of wearisome seven-game series to Tortorella’s boorishness.

Virtuoso move, coach. Especially since it averted the spotlight from the prolonged third-period benching of Marian Gaborik after he committed one of the worst kinds of crime in Tortorella’s book.

Not only did Gaborik casually attempt to clear the puck on the Devils’ tying goal, he just stood there, as useful as a lawn ornament, and failed to sacrifice his body on a shot by defenseman Bryce Salvador from the blue line. Ryan Carter tipped the puck past Lundqvist, and from then on Gaborik was mostly glued to the bench. For roughly 13 minutes Tortorella refused to let his 41-goal scorer on the ice, including the last 1:29 in regulation when Lundqvist was pulled and the desperate Rangers could have used their gamebreaking sniper.

“No,” growled the coach, when he was asked to address the decision to sit Gaborik. (In a 13-minute conference call with reporters Thursday, Tortorella was positively chatty, saying, among other things, "We really don’t spend too much worrying about what you guys are speaking about, and that’s certainly not trying to be disrespectful, but we certainly don’t. We have a lot of things in our room that we have to fix, that we have to deal with, and really block out all the other stuff.”)

Give him this: Tortorella treats superstars and fourth-liners the same way. If they lollygag or, worse, blink rather than launch themselves into the path of rock-hard rubber flying at insane speeds, the doghouse awaits. He’ll bully his players equally if they fail to deliver total defensive commitment.

Rangers forward Ruslan Fedotenko played for and won a Stanley Cup with Tortorella in Tampa, in 2004. During New York’s second-round series against Washington, as the coach’s clashes with the media veered toward legendary, Fedotenko told Bruce Arthur of the National Post that Tortorella has evolved in a positive way, especially with younger players.

“(But) if you don’t (block a shot), and you lift up your foot there and do flamingo, you will hear it, and not just you, everybody else,” Fedotenko said. “It’s more he barks at you because you probably do a sh---- job in the game, it’s bottom line. It’s not personal, it’s not nothing. If you’re doing a good job he never will bark at you.”

However many teeth he bares, Tortorella makes Mike Keenan look as if he wore a pointed party hat and blew a kazoo from behind the bench during that magical season of 1994. Tortorella might also be cursed with the same combativeness that eventually made Keenan expendable, but for now his singular focus causes his team to (almost always) want to play hard for him, to sacrifice everything. Tortorella’s soft side—so apparent in his interactions with Liam Traynor, a 10-year-old Rangers fan who has cerebral palsy—proves the Rangers coach isn’t always a raging lunatic.

No, he’s exceptionally cunning, whether it’s taking a bullet for his guys in those disastrous postgame pressers or using that platform to glibly rant about awful officiating or, ahem, some team’s whining stars. The NHL requires him to be present for these things, to stand there and sneer, but nowhere does it say he has to act like a human and offer insight or answers to fans who maybe want to know what happened to the Rangers who never were supposed to show any fatigue, or to the sniper who barely got off the bench when he was needed most.

Questions come, and Tortorella blocks them all. His veins bulge, his eyes flatten into a mean squint, his nostrils flare. But when he’s done snarling and barking, after he’s stomped away from the cameras and the reporters shaking their heads, a smile spreads above his playoff beard. The genius has struck again.